Tag: London Film Festival

Anomalisa is a truly individual film (which is ironic, considering)

 

How do you know you’ve found the right person? And how do you know they’ll stay that way? It’s this fundamental human question that forms the basis of Kaufman’s latest, Anomalisa.

Kaufman’s second film in the director’s chair follows Michael Stone, a highly successful but deeply insecure customer service guru, who experiences a reprieve from his ennui when, during a business trip to Cincinnati, he encounters Lisa, a perfectly ordinary, indeed unremarkable, call center employee, who is to him utterly unique.…

Truth misses the point somewhat

 

“Are you now or have you ever been a liberal?”

This line that has appeared in two films this London Film Festival — the first being Trumbo, a biopic of the avowed leftie screenwriter who helped to bring down the blacklist.…

Bone Tomahawk is a brutal and welcome revisionist Western

 

In Bone Tomahawk, novelist turned filmmaker S. Craig Zahler takes an approach to the Western genre that is bright, dusty, and watered with blood — think The Searchers meet The Hills Have Eyes.

When a mysterious drifter (David Arquette) wanders into the idyllic settlement of Bright Hope, Chicory (Richard Jenkins), an amiable old buffer and “backup deputy”, promptly reports it to Sheriff Franklin (newfound Western afficionado Kurt Russell), who brings the drifter in… though not without violence.…

The Lobster is a blackly heartfelt chimera of a romcom

 

You wait for one comedy about men being transformed into animals then two come along at once — a non-mating pair, if you will.

But where Kevin Smith’s Tusk was about a vicious comic forcibly losing his humanity due to a mad experiment, Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster is altogether more social and universal.…

Room is a minor masterpiece in microcosm with two miraculous performances

 

We take a lot for granted out in the world.

It’s full of space and objects, enough so that we can overlook just how much “thingness” there is to our everyday existence. Imagine a world then of only ten feet by ten feet, a world where every item has a sense of permanency to it: Bed, Wardrobe, Skylight.…

Partisan is a film with allegory issues

 

A grey curve of mountain road. A forested valley overshadowed by dilapidated tower blocks. A dog howls, off.

Nonspecific in its exact time and place, though vaguely Baltic in its devastation, the inhospitable landscape into which Partisan immerses us makes a strong case for any sort of alternative, as offered by Vincent Cassel’s Gregori.…

Black Mass is the parable of Johnny Depp and the Good Acting Choice

 

Everybody loves a good gangster film.

Whether you prefer the shadowy family drama of The Godfather or the stunning expose of Goodfellas, the criminal lifestyle lends itself to a myriad of different portrayals. In the case of Black Mass, it’s the codependent relationship between the Irish-American Mob in South Boston AKA Southie and the FBI.…

The Lady in the Van is a chip (in the sugar) off the old Bennett block

 

For a man widely regarded as Britain’s best-loved living playwright, Alan Bennett sure does have a fixation with old ladies.

It’s a perception Bennett himself laments in The Lady in the Van. He claims he’d much rather be writing about spies.…

Steve Jobs is a near perfect fusion of functionality and artistry

 

What is the current fascination with technology entrepreneurs?

From The Social Network to AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, key figures in the PC movement, real or imagined, have grown to legendary status in the public consciousness. Perhaps it’s because they are ambitious dreamers, mavericks who shape the way we interact with the world — by way of example, this review was drafted on an iPhone and written up on a Macbook — or perhaps because they provide an point of entrance into the digital realm, which is otherwise so hard to dramatize.…

Office is a lavish but dull workplace musical

 

They’re the places that, for better or worse, occupy (or rather we occupy for) most of our waking hours.

It’s perhaps surprising then that the common-or-garden workplace doesn’t feature more prominently in cinema. Sure, there’s the bureaucracy-bound comedy of Office Space, the coked-up sexcapades of Wolf of Wall Street, or the Kafkaesque delirium of Brazil — but they’re rarely characterised as productive working environments.…